Musharraf and Karzai to attend key meeting of tribal leaders

PAKISTANI President General Pervez Musharraf and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai will lead their respective sides at a grand ‘jirga’, the council of tribal elders, scheduled to be held in Kabul from August 8-11, Pakistan’s National Assembly member Munir Khan Orakzai told Gulf Times in Doha yesterday.

The proposed Jirga assumes vital importance amid reports of rising incidence of Taliban-supported activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the US governments’ threats to strike Al Qaeda targets in the restive area inside Pakistan and bordering Afghanistan.

The US has been blaming Pakistan-based Taliban sympathisers for the growing number of attacks on allied troops in Afghanistan.

“Most of the 12 National Assembly and eight Senate members from the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) will join the delegation, along with hundreds of tribal elders from throughout the region,” said Orakzai, a long-term Doha resident.

“We have reiterated numerous times about the need of reaching a lasting solution to the problem, after due consultation with all concerned parties,” said Orakzai, also the Parliamentary leader for the FATA.

Adding to the tension yesterday, America’s Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama said Washington must be willing to strike Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan.

Obama’s stance comes amid debate in Washington over what to do about a resurgent Al Qaeda and Taliban in areas of northwest Pakistan that President Musharraf has been unable to control, and concerns that new recruits are trained there for a September 11-style attack against the US.

Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government, a move that would likely cause anxiety in the already troubled region.

“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said.

The Illinois Democrat is trying to convince Americans he has the foreign policy heft to be president after a rival candidate, New York Democratic Senator Hilary Clinton, questioned his readiness to be commander-in-chief.

Clinton last week labelled Obama naïve for saying he would be willing to meet the leaders of Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela without preconditions in his first year in office.